Nickolas Pompana is a 22-year-old university student who paid good money to hear a fatherly university professor admonish him on the moral dangers of casual sex.

“It really resonated with me,” he said. “When you treat somebody that way, as a hookup, what are they? Simply a tool for your pleasure.”

It wasn’t the first time the young man defied stereotypes on Tuesday evening, as he stood outside the Conexus Arts Centre after a speaking event with Jordan Peterson. Pompana grew up on a First Nations reserve, but he expressed delight in the controversial University of Toronto professor’s call to show “gratitude” for historical figures like Sir. John A. Macdonald.

“The statue obviously stands for something. It stands for tradition,” Pompana said of an effigy to the prime minister that was recently removed in Victoria, B.C. “It stands for values, it stands for gratitude, which is exactly what Professor Peterson said.”

After the event, Pompana reflected on what he sees in Peterson. He said it feels good to be reaffirmed in his convictions, which sometimes feel out of place at the University of Regina.

“It helps me feel like I’m not crazy,” he said.

But most of all, Pompana — who came dressed in a button-up vest and shiny brown shoes — said he appreciates the professor’s focus on personal responsibility. Peterson ran through 10 of his 12 Rules for Life in a speech promoting his book of the same name. He told a near-capacity audience that “life is rife with suffering,” and urged them to do the hard work to claw their way out of it.

“Instead of blaming the structure of the world for the seeming inadequacies of being… take stock of your own inadequacies,” said Peterson.

It’s a message that proved popular with the crowd, which gave Peterson two standing ovations. But the audience — which spanned from teenagers to seniors and skewed only slightly male — reserved its sharpest applause for Peterson’s forays into politics.

That’s hardly surprising, as the clinical psychologist first gained notoriety for his opposition to Bill C-16, which will add gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Peterson’s resistance to gender-neutral pronouns earned the enmity of many on the left. While he largely avoided that issue on Tuesday, he didn’t shy away from controversy when answering pre-submitted questions from the audience.

He called efforts to privilege diversity according to group identities like race, gender or sexual orientation “deeply wrong.”

“I think that at the bottom of this diversity, inclusivity, equity nonsense is a true hatred for competence,” said Peterson.

He said parents should guide their children into the sciences to avoid what a questioner called “indoctrination” in Canadian universities.

“The loss of the integrity of the humanities is an absolute catastrophe,” Peterson said.

“There’s no shortage of reprehensible behaviour in the history of Western civilization. Hey, fair enough, and maybe you can lay some of that at the feet of the people who founded our country,” he acknowledged.

And he regretted the ascendance of “hookup culture,” which he called “a big mistake.”

“I don’t think you can reduce sexuality to casual pleasure without reducing the person that you’re having sex with to nothing but the provider of casual pleasure,” he said.

Jordan Peterson delivers a lecture to a large crowd at the Conexus Arts Centre.BRANDON HARDER /
Regina Leader-Post

Peterson repeatedly struck out at “Marxists” and “postmodern” thinkers who — in his broad-strokes description — see society as an arena of power struggles between competing groups. That matches Pompana’s view. He believes the left is telling him what a young Indigenous man should believe.

“He kind of calls out the left on that,” he said. “They’re saying: If you’re a Native American, you have to be this way. And that’s entirely not true.”

Peterson’s message also appealed to central services minister Ken Cheveldayoff, who said he first heard of the professor only a few months ago. Cheveldayoff said he came to look through the intellectual lens Peterson “brings to everyday concerns and problems that we have in our society.”

He said he appreciated the professor’s comments on showing gratitude for historical figures and agreed that any “constriction” of intellectual freedom at the university would be a cause for concern. He said his main takeaway is Peterson’s Rule Four: “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”

“I think that’s something that I’m going to take back with me and say, ‘How can I make myself better tomorrow?’” said the minister.

“I really enjoy the personal responsibility.”

But the crowd wasn’t entirely populated by true believers and Saskatchewan Party politicians. Logan Seidlick said he came to hear views that differ in many ways from his own. Seidlick, who is non-religious and enjoys new atheist figures, said he was interested in Peterson’s views on the unifying force of religious ideas.

“It’s interesting to hear someone with a developed point of view on the opposite side,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard such a convincing argument for its importance, even though I’m not a believer now.”

He said he found some of that in Peterson’s speech, and still feels like the controversy around Peterson is “odd.” He said he feels media “sound bites” lead many to take Peterson out of context. But he added that his “skeptical side kicked in” Tuesday when he considered the professor’s harsh critique of journalists.

Peterson said he finds many reporters come with preset agendas and don’t engage in genuine dialogue with his views — a point that earned applause from parts of the crowd and an inscrutable outburst citing the name of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Seidlick found that the question and answer segment of Peterson’s event, which saw him scroll through a list of questions, seemed to have its own preset agenda.

“The question and answer part was pretty clearly him doing that,” said Seidlick. “It was a way of him being ‘now is a chance for me to dictate things and stand on a soapbox.’”

But he said that might be unavoidable at a big event. He still enjoyed the “free-form” nature of Peterson’s speaking style.

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